About the Client
Treasury Corporation of Victoria (TCV) supports the State of Victoria and its agencies and departments by assisting in the management of their financial risks. TCV provides tailored loans and financing, as well as advisory services focused on providing low-cost funding and effective financial risk management for the government and their clients. The majority of TCV’s IT is managed in-house.
The Project
To help meet increasing demands on capacity, TCV chose Onel to implement a Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) solution designed to enhance capacity, speed, security, and flexibility. A key requirement of this project was to implement a scalable infrastructure where compute and storage could be dialled up or down individually for better cost-efficiency and reliability. With a small in-house infrastructure team, it was also important for the solution to feature easy management that would maximise the efficiency of TCV’s IT team.
On top of these key IT requirements, minimal downtime was essential during the platform migration. The mission critical nature of state financing meant that it was critical that this project didn’t disrupt operations during business hours.
How Onel Worked with the Project We worked closely with TCV’s Infrastructure Manager, Veronika Mikac, and her team to determine TCV’s desired outcomes and identify the best and most cost-effective solution that would deliver on these goals. Our team of specialists then implemented a Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) that features powerful HPE Apollo Servers, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Optane™ SSD and the VMware vCenter Server management platform which are seamlessly integrated with TCV’s existing infrastructure.
“Onel were able to provide their technical expertise to fit in with TCV’s risk appetite business and service it provides for the Victorian government. The Onel team were very knowledgeable and professional with their service delivery. They did their due diligence and therefore were very thorough in the solution design which was presented to TCV. Weekly project meetings helped with an efficient and smooth implementation, and ensured the target date was met.”
Veronika Mikac, Manager, Infrastructure – Treasury Corporation of Victoria
To ensure minimal downtime, Onel worked with TCV’s IT infrastructure team to ensure a fast and seamless migration from their existing platform to their new platform.
"There was basically no unplanned downtime during business hours while the new infrastructure was being integrated with our current one. Certain parts of the project could have caused a complete outage, but Onel’s team worked with us to identify what we could and couldn't do, as well as planning riskier changes after hours. This helped us manage risk so that people experienced business as usual during the migration.”
Travis McKinnon, Infrastructure Engineer – Treasury Corporation of Victoria
The Outcome and Benefits
The upgraded infrastructure our team implemented for TCV delivers faster workloads, higher availability, simplified ongoing operations, better security in a cost-effective infrastructure. Using HPE’s dHCI platform with VMware vSphere provides a robust, stable platform for server virtualisation. With both automatic high availability and single click cross-site disaster recovery, the new platform modernised TCV’s capacity and ability to deliver ICT services.
Unlike other hyperconverged platforms, HPE’s dHCI platform allows TCV to scale their infrastructure to match their ICT consumption. This design offers better value for money from day one and well into the future by ensuring that TCV always have what they need, while only paying for what they use.
“The HPE Nimble dHCI solution continues to be a great improvement from maintaining standalone arrays. We have found the added automation and visibility of storage, compute and virtual machines on HPE InfoSight to be a great time saver with its single pane monitoring and analytics. VMware’s NSX-T is also an enabler for greater network optimisations around improved network security, business continuity and disaster recovery.”
Travis McKinnon, Infrastructure Engineer – Treasury Corporation of Victoria
By implementing the VMware NSX-T solution, we also allowed TCV to extend their ICT network capabilities and security. The VMware NSX-T deployment included a full integration with TCV’s existing security platform, extending protection to port-level micro-segmentation security. The virtualised network platform means that TCV can stretch L2 networks to any location, including supported public cloud platforms, future-proofing their ICT network with instant hybrid cloud capabilities.
Both platforms were deployed with minimal maintenance and administrative overhead, saving TCV’s team valuable time. Their effort to maintain and operate the platforms decreased, while security and ability to deliver ICT services was significantly increased.
What the Client Said
“This project has delivered better security, simpler infrastructure management, more powerful platform performance and the peace-of-mind that comes with reliable data recovery. We now have network virtualisation and a high performing network where we can further implement other projects in the pipeline due to increased capabilities of our network.”
Veronika Mikac, Infrastructure Manager – Treasury Corporation of Victoria
“Onel shows great levels of customer support and professionalism in all our engagements. It was very pleasing to have such a complex project delivered on time and on budget with no disruptions to our mission critical operations.”
Warren Murray, General Manager Information Technology – Treasury Corporation of Victoria
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